In the discussion of the background that follows, reference is made to certain structures, systems, and/or methods. However, the following references should not be construed as an admission that these structures, systems, and/or methods constitute prior art. The inventor expressly reserves the right to demonstrate that such structures, systems, and/or methods do not qualify as prior art.
In the background art, certain systems have been designed for dynamic advertising for the Internet and interactive games. For example, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2006/0105841 is directed to a dynamic advertising system for interactive games and describes an apparatus for adding and displaying objects within an interactive game program that can be updated interactively while the game is being played. The system can track the actual exposure of the advertisement. U.S. Pat. No. 8,160,925 is directed to a system for generating a smart advertisement based on a dynamic file and a configuration file, and is capable of generating advertisement based on targeting information, user interests, and deals, and can improve the displayed adds.
Moreover, U.S. Pat. No. 8,000,581 is directed to an advertisement scheme that can be used with interactive content, and allows suspending the playing of the interactive content, to display an advertisement, and resuming the playing of the interactive content. U.S. Pat. No. 7,698,178 is directed to an online game advertising system, in which advertisements are displayed within a billboard that appears within a game playing space of the game program. The system allows the interacting with a user to provide additional information about a product being advertised.
However, when large amounts of resources are directed towards advertising in a virtual environment, for example virtual living spaces such as SecondLife®, SimCity®, strategy games such as Colonization®, Civilization®, first-person shooter games Call of Duty®, Grand Theft Auto®, simulation environments such as Flight Simulator®, X-Plane®, Gran Turismo®, etc., analysis of the effectiveness towards a user or a user group of the advertising that appears in the virtual environment can be desirable. Also, analysis of advertising effectiveness can be difficult due to the cost involved in conducting the analysis, the time involved in collecting and analyzing data, and the difficult decisions that have to be made regarding what data to collect, when to collect the data, and where to collect the data. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and a method of analyzing advertising effectiveness in accordance with the present invention.